Governing the Empire. Provincial Administration in the Almohad Caliphate (1224-1269): Critical Edition, Translation, and Study of Manuscript 4752 of the Ḥasaniyya Library in Rabat Containing 77 Taqādīm ("Appointments")

traduction anglaise Travis BruceGoverning Empire is a study, accompanied by a re-edition and a French translation, of maǧmūʿ Yaḥyá, the " compendium of Yaḥyá ", manuscript 4752 in the Library ḥasaniyya in Rabat. This little volume, the surviving copy of which dates from the 16th-17th centuries, reproduces a formulary composed in the late 13th century by Yaḥyá al-Ḫaḏūǧ, a man of letters living at the time of the demise of the Almohad Empire in 1269. It contains 77 acts of appointment of provincial officials, governors, military chiefs, chiefs of Arab tribes, tax-collectors and judges, written between 1224 and 1269. Of this total, 73 acts (two of them identical) concern the Almohad Empire, especially the Maghrebian part, and four concern the anti-Almohad principality of Ibn Hūd al-Mutawakkil of Murcia (r. 1228-1238) in the Iberian Peninsula. The acts reproduced by Yaḥyá belong to the highly codified genre of chancery literature. Written most frequently in rhyming prose (saǧʿ) and intended for proclamation in the great mosques of the Empire, they obey rules of composition and follow rhetorical, syntactical and linguistic procedures which place them --as the compiler asserts-- in the sphere of the adab, that is literature, or more generally the culture of the "man of good breeding". Partaking of poetry, sermon, oratory, normative literature and religious discourse, the appointments reproduced there are the expression of a sovereign order, the Almohad imperial order, or the anti-Almohad order of the Hūdi principality of Murcia. Set down in writing and rendered anonymous through the quasi-systematic deletion of proper names, toponyms and dates, these acts were neutralized for the use of successive specialists in the language of power. Performative as they were, they came to be accepted as models and thus were absorbed into the ever-growing thesaurus of reference texts. This pragmatic collection is the last vestige of the most important indigenous authority in the history of the Maghreb. Governing Empire begins by retracing the political history of the Almohad Empire and the stages through which a territory and an authority were built up. It recalls the ideological, political and religious foundations which made Ibn Tūmart possible to unify the Maghreb and al-Andalus in the mid-12th century in the service of a dynasty of Berber origin. ʿAbd al-Mu'min (r. 1130-1162) and his descendants, the Mu'minids, mobilised the strength of the tribes of the time, Berber and Arab, to impose a dogma devised by the greatest of contemporary thinkers. Living witnesses of the islamization and arabization of the Maghreb, this dynasty resolved to reorganize the structures of power and authority to its own advantage. The Almohad sovereigns, who had assumed the title of Caliph in consonance with their pretension to guide all the peoples of Islam (umma), in the manner of the Muʿtazilite in 9th-century Iraq, claimed for themselves the authority to interpret divine law. To that end, jurists and wise men were separated from the interpretative process that the Malikite school had reserved to them since the 9th century, and they were reduced to judicial tasks or enrolled in the chancery services. The literature that the chancery produced, of which the manuscript presented, re-edited and translated here is one of the fundamental examples, plainly reveals this reversal of the relationships of authority between the religious knowledge of the ulemas and the political power of the caliphs. The organization of the "compendium of Yaḥyá", which is presented in the second part, throws light on the original ideological concepts predominating at the close of the Almohad era: thus, military and fiscal functions, which belong to the political order --governors, army generals, admirals of the fleet and tax collectors-- are clearly set apart from the judicial functions pertaining to the judges. Law-making devolved upon the sovereign, the sole authorized interpreter of divine law as embodied in the Qur'an and Tradition. The task of creating positive law thus rested entirely with the Caliph-imām, heir to the founder of the Almohad movement, Ibn Tūmart (d. 1130) -- the guide inspired by God, "impeccable imām and acknowledged Mahdī". The tasks assigned to the appointed functionaries, the counsels and orders given them, and the instructions addressed to subjects, all clearly reflect the organic conception of society and of imperial authority that characterized the Almohad ideology. That ideology was revolutionary inasmuch as it clearly departed from functionalist approaches, like that implicit in the al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭāniyya wa l-Wilāyat al-Dīniyya ("The Ordinances of Government") of al-Māwardī (d. 1058). The careful edition and the French translation of Yaḥyá's formulary in the third part of Governing Empire give a good idea of the breadth of literary talent demanded of chancery secretaries, veritable craftsmen of language, simply to produce the decrees of power. The infinite stylistic and lexical variations combine adherence to rigid codes of chancery language with the kind of poetic and rhetorical innovations characteristic of great works of literature. This work on the language of power, at once laborious and skilled, bureaucratic and poetic, puts a voice to a specific authority --the authority of the Almohad caliphs, rooted in a particular time and place: the 13th-century Maghreb. The posthumous compilation of these performative utterances abstracts the language of power and sets Almohad history, dogma and order in the context of the corpus of timeless Islamic authorities. This formulary thus affords a glimpse of the specific nature of and the role played by administrative archives in the mediaeval Muslim world and throws light on the exceptional intricacy of Islamic imperial bureaucracies as exemplified by their chancery, the dīwān al-inšā', literally the "bureau of creation"